🏕️ DWeb debrief: 10 new apps for groups & communities.

some notes on the decentralized web, from the heart of the redwoods

Hello, citizens What’s up, my dudes.
It’s summertime at New_ Public, which means two things:

Our monthly event on 7/19 at 3pm ET / 12 noon PT
is gonna be fun and super chill, more of a kickback;

And our annual survey is back again for a fourth consecutive year.

Both of these outlets are an excellent way to make your voice heard at New_ Public. Tell us where you’re at with social tech, and we’ll put in the work to meet you there.

Hope to see you at our first Summer Session on 7/19.
And speak your mind in The New_ Public Survey 2023.

Opt-in to “Options” with us.

Welcome to your summer of Options.

I can’t believe 2023 is halfway done, can you?

The New_ Public newsletter started the year in our Stan Era, and then we flipped to Status Season for spring.

For the next few months, we’ll be exploring our Options. Here’s what will be on our minds in the near future:

• With a significant uptick in public-spirited protocols and platforms joining the fray, how will citizens know which option is right for their needs and their communities?

• As websites comply with new public safety regulations, how well are individuals comprehending what they’re opting into and what they’re opting out of? Must we always make these selections alone, or could there be a collective option?

• What options do code-builders and and program stewards have when designing their offerings? When should we follow best practices, and when should we challenge conventional wisdom?

The recent splashy launch of Threads is a strong indication that there is an appetite for something fresh and innovative in digital public space. This summer, we’ll help you discover (or rediscover) those “options.”

To kick things off for Options, I’m very pleased to welcome back our Head of Product Partnerships, Sam Liebeskind, who’s here to report on New_ Public’s recent team trip to DWeb Camp. Lead the way, Sam! —PM

Wendy Hanamura on the DWeb Camp mainstage.

Inspiring new community tools from DWeb Camp.

Amidst what feels like a whirlwind of a month in the world of social networks, a couple of us headed up to Camp Navarro in the Northern California woods last week to join more than 500 designers, artists, activists, and engineers at DWeb Camp—the heart of a growing movement to create tools and platforms based on shared values of mutual respect, distribution of power, human agency, and civic responsibility.

The conversations under the trees and ‘round the campfire touched on everything from ethical AI to new forms of collective intelligence, but we were most excited to see so much energy this year on new tools for social networking and grassroots community organizing.

Here’s a look at some of the projects that had us feeling most inspired and hopeful for the future of digital public spaces.

Hylo

Hylo is an up & coming community platform with a powerful ‘holonic’ structure that enables coordination within and across groups. It’s run as a non-profit so they don’t have built-in incentives to design for addiction, and their code base is fully open-source. It’s currently being used by purpose-driven groups such as Zebras Unite and bioregional networks like Salmon Nation. They’re exploring features related to more dynamic governance and participatory budgeting too.

socialroots

socialroots is a co-op building a platform to help solve gnarly coordination challenges among groups tackling systemic problems like climate change, healthcare, and education. Unlike social media platforms that are designed for individuals and SaaS tools designed for enterprises, socialroots is focused on building a flexible tool for networks with different kinds of organizing structures. They’re publicly funded (via a grant from the National Science Foundation) and the product is currently in private beta.

Mozilla

Mozilla has long been a force-for-good on the internet and earlier this year launched their own mastodon instance Mozilla.Social. Separately, their Emerging Products team has some social-network-y things in the works as well 👀, and we’re excited to follow along.

Futureproof, Neighbourhoods, We

Futureproof, Neighbourhoods, and We are three separate projects building decentralized community platforms with high levels of community-control and modularity. The idea here is to create the foundations on top of which groups & communities can add different ‘applets’ (i.e. calendar, chats, feeds, wikis) to create a digital space with their own feel & functionality. These are all pre-launch or in super early beta, but we love the concepts!

Lips

Lips is a feminist technology organization building a safer social platform “for women, non-binary folks, lgbtqia+ individuals, and their fans…without the unhealthy aspects of mainstream internet culture such as online harassment, discriminatory censorship, and plagiarism.” They’re doing a bunch of cool stuff around community co-design and thinking about how machine learning and AI can be used to improve the online experience of traditionally marginalized communities.

Matrix

Matrix is a UK non-profit that’s been around for almost a decade and continues to lead the way on all things interoperability. They’ve been hard at work this year getting ready to release one of their biggest performance-improvement upgrades in their history next month.

Factr

Factr is a wiki-style platform that’s aiming to make it easy to share knowledge among people and communities. The organization is entirely funded by people who use the platform (no ads!) and offers a ton of flexibility around public vs. private content.

Group Income

Group Income is a brand new product from the non-profit OkTurtles that makes it easy for groups of friends & communities to create a basic income for themselves among one another. If you have a group of 8 people and are interested in trying the beta, get in touch with their team!

Out here in the field: Ravon at the gramophone, Sam among the redwoods.

Some other updates from old and new friends.

It was also wonderful to spend time with other folks who are working in and around the space in different ways.

• MetaGov continues to experiment and & host some really provocative conversations around community governance.

• Lets Studio is working to help public-serving institutions craft inclusive participatory design processes and create digital tools that reach people where they are.

• CommonAgency is creating a new type of irl neighborhood network where people connect with neighbors over ideas and projects, not just complaints.

• Goodly Labs is building tools that foster healthier digital social interactions to strengthen democracy and meaningfully include more people in the creation of society.

• Spritely is building a new protocol for community platforms.

• Distributed Press is an early-stage open-source publishing tool for the open internet. 

And last but not least, a huge shoutout to our friends at the Internet Archive who put the camp together, and the whole DWeb community for showing up with such a generous and passionate spirit. We’ll see you next year! 

Are you building a platform for groups and communities?

As New_Public continues to evolve, we’re excited to work alongside folks exploring similar areas of research & experimentation.

If you’re building something for groups & communities and thinking about things like collective ownership & governance, new tools for community stewardship, or alternative approaches to moderation — we’d love to chat and figure out ways to collab.

We’ve got a couple of new programs in the works, including our Community Stewards Guild (more to come on this in our next newsletter) and Community Platform Builders’ Sandbox — a pilot accelerator program (think: funding, peer support, access to a network of experts, etc.) for early-stage teams creating new tools for groups and communities. If either of those sound interesting, say hi! 

Ultimately, our time at DWeb gave us more conviction than ever that the world is full of incredible designers and builders and stewards who share this grand vision for digital public spaces and we’re excited to all be on this journey together.

As Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle put it during his talk at camp: instead of a few massive corporations having all the power, let’s create a game with many winners. 🌲

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And those are the “Options” for this week. Next time, we’ll unveil one of our long-awaited programs: the Community Stewards Guild.

Stacking up my s’mores,
Paul